Sharing personal ponderings, anecdotes and lessons in God's truth

Just a quick blog to check in, and also to share an update of a project I have been working on.

A year or so ago I wrote a blog about my miscarriage, and what I had learned so far through the experience. It has remained an issue close to my heart, as my exploration of the topic has continued. Grieving a miscarriage, as I am discovering, is not as simple as grieving a singular event – there are emotional tendrils connecting this loss to so many other areas of my life, past and present. When I open my heart up to feel about one aspect, the enormity of the issue can quickly become overwhelming, and often I retreat in fear. All these years later, it is still often at the forefront of my mind. I feel like perhaps I’m being shown that it’s kind of like a ‘cornerstone’ piece to my growth puzzle; that if I continue to engage emotionally with what needs to be felt as it arises, I will be lead all the way back to where it began, and shown what else needs to be healed along the way (a lot).

So when I had to choose a topic for an assignment to complete during the Divine Truth and God’s Way volunteer selection program in 2017, guess what came to mind first? You got it. I tried to fight with it; “no, there has to be something better than that”… “I don’t know where to begin with that”… “Seriously though, anything but that”… Eventually the fight was in vain and I began my study of the global issue of miscarriage, and the welfare of the unborn child in general.

The title of the project we were given was ‘Benefiting the World’.

I’d like to share with you the assignment brief, as it is possibly the most inspiring and relevant instructions for an assignment I have ever been given, in my countless years of study.

“Participants are to individually design and begin to implement a project which aims to resolve causes, or educate others about the causes, of a global problem.

This assignment is designed to encourage participants to think of ways to practically apply principles of God’s Love and Truth to global issues. For the project participants can create new systems, refine existing systems and/or deal with issues and problems that affect worldwide communities and the environment. Participants are asked to focus on the causes rather than the effects of a global problem. Participants will research and choose a subject they feel passionate about and come up with ideas in harmony with God’s Way to change, improve or provide a solution to the problem. Participants will create a project based on their ideas.”

We were required to develop a written submission composed of our action plan, and also give a 15 minute presentation to the group. Once I settled on the topic I wished to investigate, I felt really inspired. My initial project ideas spanned the vast reaches between tiny, short term goals of sharing my personal experience via a website, to huge long term and systemic change in parent education, sex education and the adoption and foster care systems. It became clear to me there was an important connection between miscarriage, abortion and other issues affecting unborn children such as disability and disease. When you start looking at addressing causes, things get seriously mega-sized, and fast!

I began to see that there has to be a way of gathering scientifically valid evidence for the true causes of all phenomena that occurs. Everything is measurable; it’s just about finding or creating the tools to measure it. Miscarriage is a phenomena I have experienced personally, and armed with that as well as some really useful information which has helped me to see and feel the truth about my experience, I think I have a pretty solid hypothesis to test.

My hypothesis is this: miscarriage is not arbitrary, but rather occurs as a result of emotions and emotional beliefs inside of the parents, projected at the child intentionally or unintentionally, which cause the child to pass prematurely.

I want to understand the wider experience of miscarriage. I want to see if any patterns emerge through examining other people’s experiences. I want to collect stories to begin to understand more about the soul and how it effects its environment. I want to share my story from a place of imperfection, humility and open-heartedness in the hope it might help others to reflect on their own internal belief systems surrounding their lost child. I’m not really sure yet how to accurately measure things pertaining to the soul and emotion. But I’m interested to learn.

So here is my beginning. I’ve created a website as a starting point for my rather large vision for protecting the welfare of unborn children.

It is currently a platform for both sharing useful information, collating current available research on the topic, sharing my experience, and hopefully gathering data from others.

Here is a short animated video I made about my miscarriage, as presented on the website:

One of my main aims is to research miscarriage, and learn more about how to study the soul. I think if a solid link can be established between emotions/beliefs and miscarriage, then this would indicate that indeed the unborn child is a highly sensitive and feeling soul.

That’s all from me for now. Feel free to go on over and check out the site, and share it with anyone you think could benefit or assist in my research.

Love,

Phoebe

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I spend fairly regular moments or chunks of time in intellectual self-reflection. In re-visiting memories in an attempt to gain further clarity about my life, I generally tread the by now familiar and well-worn pathways of a relatively limited set; limited in comparison to what must comprise a vast jungle of feelings, images and full memories connected to my every experience – 32 years’ worth, no less! It so often feels like one of those really annoying jigsaw puzzles you buy second hand, missing corners and edges in abundance. I guess the real difference is that no matter how many couches are upturned, or vacuum cleaner bags are emptied, the jigsaw puzzle piece is gone forever – it was never yours to begin with. In the case of memories, I have heard that the soul in fact contains all of our memories, every last one of them is still there, but the reason I can’t access many of them is because I do not want to feel the feelings that are connected to them.

I have enough memories in certain areas of my life to see distinct patterns in my own behaviour which have emerged over time. I would like to talk about what I am discovering about myself through some of these past behaviours, and how this relates to moral degradation over time through poor choices and decisions.

I recently listened to a channeling conducted by AJ Miller and Anto Klobucar. AJ chats with a teenage girl, Jess, who died at 16 years of age, about 5 years prior to the recording. She had proceeded to spend the years since her passing hanging around the earth, basically going from party to party, attempting to experience drugs, alcohol and sex, through people still living on earth*. Jess attempts to explain how she felt compelled, over and over, to seek out ‘pleasurable’ experiences, and how over time she felt driven to influence people to engage in more and more intense and unloving behaviours, in order to feel the same level of ‘pleasure’. AJ beautifully helps her to see that while she continues to deny and avoid the existence of the painful and hurt feelings inside her heart, she will continue to feel compelled to seek out these experiences. And while she engages actions which cause harm to other people and herself, true pleasure and true joy will forever elude her, and in fact her unhappiness will grow.

(You can listen to the audio of this channeling here, or watch the video here. It’s a really interesting example of how addictions cause unhappiness and moral degradation and I would recommend it.)

Even though Jess is a spirit, and began this behaviour once she’d passed, I can see so many parallels with my own life.

At 13 – 14 I was pretty shy and unsure of myself, and very awkward around boys. I had, and still have, some very large ‘holes’** in my soul, as a result of pain created in me that I at first was not allowed to feel as a child, and then later chose not to feel. Instead I chose to seek experiences which helped me to avoid the existence of the pain altogether. Although shy, awkward, and totally weird around boys I desperately wanted their attention to make me feel good about myself. I would spend hours obsessing over a boy; did he look at me, for how many seconds, did he walk past me in the hallway today etc. At 14, I attracted a boy who wanted to engage with me, albeit on his terms a ‘secret’ relationship, and when the question of the ‘first kiss’ arose it took me three hours of sweaty palms, panic, avoidance and terror to let it happen.

It wasn’t so bad. In fact it felt quite good.

It wasn’t long before I was sneaking over to his house regularly, and closing the bedroom door behind us. This was the only place we engaged; at school I had to pretend I didn’t know him. But it didn’t matter to me, because what we had was special. The feeling I got when I was with him was worth the decision to compromise on what felt good and right.

Every time you want to avoid pain, you create an addiction. Every time you create an addiction, it becomes a compulsion. Every time you have a compulsion, you’re going to be drawn to satisfy the compulsion – AJ Miller

With my first long term boyfriend, a few years later, I found a great degree of ‘performance’ entered the bedroom. “If I try that, he’ll really love me”, or, “if I do it this way, he won’t forget about me”. Sex had become a tool of manipulation. As the years wore on, I found myself believing it to be okay, and even a cool thing to have sex with someone I didn’t even know. I found myself in sexual situations that just a few short years before I would never have even dreamed of – which I would often come away from feeling terrible about on some level – and yet this still felt cool to me; it felt worldly. I had become so desensitized to the girl who at 14 felt petrified of kissing a boy, or the even younger child who just wanted to be loved.

My addiction in this case was not the physical act of intimacy, or sex, as I currently understand it. My addiction was/is to feelings I would get whilst I had the attention and interest of a man, and sexual activity was just a bartering system I used in order to get that feeling. Pursuing this ‘feel good’ feeling – at the expense of just getting real about what was really going on inside of me – led me to take more and more unloving actions; not only harming myself, but involving and harming others along the way. (By the way, I don’t feel that exploring sexually from a young age is wrong, it’s just that I’ve since learnt that sexual intimacy was made to be between two partners who actually desire to love each other, quite a foreign concept to me!***)

Every time you decide to try to substitute a feeling, it’s never going to work out well. No matter how much you try to substitute a feeling, the underlying feeling still remains – AJ Miller

It’s a similar pattern in my experimentation with alcohol and drugs. Somehow I went from a 16 year old sneaking a sip of port with a girlfriend and singing under the moon, to finding myself a few years later in a moment in time whereby I couldn’t name all of the substances currently in my bloodstream, and I was having trouble remembering who I was and how I got there. As with the previous example, I had made hundreds upon hundreds of choices over the course of some years, choices which led me down the path of moral degradation – that is, to a place where I no longer could see that I what I was doing was morally wrong, each decision only seemingly slightly worse than the last. If someone had offered me a smorgasbord of different drugs when I had only just started drinking alcohol, I would have said “no way! I would never do that!” But I have found that that’s not how it tends to happen. In my experience, each choice I made to have another opportunity to seek out ‘pleasurable’ feelings was only a small step away from the last, gradually walking a pathway to more and more pain.

I loved the feeling of escape and freedom I got when I used alcohol but mostly drugs. Everything in my life felt okay, for that short period of time. Every time I chose to chase this feeling, I was choosing to avoid connection to myself, and to what was really going on inside. Every time I chose to seek the false high, I harmed myself, and often those around me. Because of this perpetual harm I was doing, I was actually creating more pain and suffering in my soul, it was getting harder and harder to feel good, the “come-downs” were getting more and more painful, and I had to engage more extreme behaviour to have any good feelings at all. It’s a terribly vicious and downward spiral.

Most people who are being compelled by addiction don’t want to see what they are doing to their body, they don’t want to see what they are creating in their life, and they don’t want to see the pain they are creating in other people.

At each choice you can stop and go “hang on, this is a really critical choice for me, if I make the next choice where am I going to go?” And you can choose not to go there; you can say “okay, I’m going to make a different choice now” – AJ Miller

I’m only really just making some intellectual connections and deconstruction of the way in which I have chosen to use my will over the course of my life. I can see that I was a ship, headed full speed for the iceberg. But to be honest, if anything I’ve only applied the brakes sightly. There are some obvious patterns in my life that have changed, and yet I am still resisting feeling a lot of pain and fear – the original feelings I was trying to get away from all those years ago are still around – and so my emotional and physical addictions – my personal avoidance strategies, if you will – have just morphed into different forms (many of which were also present years ago, I just wasn’t aware), e.g. food, TV series’, judgement, approval-seeking behaviour, control, commiseration, physical appearance issues, self-attack, pulling down of others… the list goes on. Honestly, I’m scratching the tip of the iceberg when it comes to understanding my addictions and how I choose to let them control and corrupt my life instead of allowing whats underneath them to surface. It’s going to take a lot of sincere desire to turn this ship around; desire to be real, to feel the pain underneath all of my façade and falsity, and also now to really feel how I have harmed others and myself in this pursuit of ‘pleasure’.

True joy can only come to you once you’ve let go of the sorrow and fears that are inside of you. And the only way to let them go – the way that God designed the soul – the only way to let them go once they’re in you, is to experience them – AJ Miller

I love the way Mary Luck/Magdalene describes how we create addictions:

God, in His beautiful loving wisdom, is bringing us events all the time to help us see what is inside of us, but because we want to stay in denial we go “How can I avoid this? How can I get a feeling that’s not scary or sad, but a happy one? I’ll create an addiction. I’ll create some relationship with people or my environment that will help me avoid this strange stirring up thing that’s happening as I walk through my life” – Mary, ‘The Human Soul – Denial and Addiction’

In my mind, I can logically see that letting go of addictions and feeling through my false beliefs that tend to keep me stuck would lead to a happier life and the potential for an awesome relationship with God, my Soulmate, and other people. Currently, however, I still want many of my emotional and physical addictions to get met so I don’t have to feel the uncomfortable, painful feelings that are inside me; whether I choose to acknowledge them or not. I still often lack faith that my life will indeed continue to get better if I surrender this pursuit of immediate and shallow gratifications, and instead turn my heart and soul towards love, and knowing God’s Way. For my moral compass has for so long been wrong, the needle shaky; guiding my feet further down the path of fear and denial.

Moment by moment we have the opportunity to choose differently; to turn the ship around. The enormity of this still eludes me, but something inside me feels it to be true. As Mary Luck says:

“In my experience becoming more loving is not a single choice but it is a lot of choices that we make every single day. Over time they don’t feel like individual choices anymore because our will is strong and we don’t even consider that we might not take the humble path. But in reality the use of our will is a moment by moment exercise. We make a gazillion choices and decisions every single day – on a soul level – and our outward actions and emotions reflect these soul based choices” – Mary Luck

God, help me grow the desire and courage to reset my compass to love, true love; and be kind to myself as I re-trace my steps and tidy up the mess I have left along the way.

Teach me about morals and ethics; help me strive to be good and value integrity.

Help me to learn patience and tenderness, so I may be patient and tender with myself as I uncover those things within that I have shamed and judged.

I know that my emotional addictions are the biggest thing standing in the way of progress towards true happiness, love and God. I think many people are potentially in the same boat. If you would like more info about addictions and how to discover and process them, here are some links from Divine Truth teachings, but there are many, many resources available about the topics from other sources:

*From what I have heard, many people who die continue to live their life engaging with the earth after they pass, attempting to influence people and get desires satisfied that are often quite harmful to themselves and those they influence. This is instead of completing the transition to their new home/location in the spirit world. This is a whole topic in and of itself, which I don’t fully understand, but which you can find out more about here, on the DT YouTube playlist about spirits.

** I use the word ‘hole’ as I have heard it used by the Teachings of Divine Truth to describe the effect of having emotional damage inside of ourselves/our soul. It’s not actually a hole, I don’t think, but more of an energetic opening. I have heard that the way to heal these holes which cause unhappiness is through emotionally experiencing what actually caused the damage in the first place, not by patching it up with short-term quick fix feelings.

***You can find out heaps more about Soulmates if you click onto the Divine Truth YouTube channel and type ‘soulmates’ here

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I would like to write about a topic that I understand is quite controversial for a number of reasons. But never the less it is a topic close to my heart and one I feel deserves attention and examination. It’s about children dying, and in particular through miscarriage and abortion. I just want to acknowledge that I don’t feel I am passing any judgement in what I share, as I have personally experienced a miscarriage, so I am coming from this side of the issue.

From what I have seen in the media, read in books/articles, and observe through my own experience, children appear to be among, if not the worst treated group of individuals currently on the planet. Children around the world suffer every moment at the hands of people who have the ability to choose differently, to choose to love instead of acting from fear. When those of us in Western society think about the suffering of children, perhaps images of starving African babies sucking hopelessly at empty breasts comes to mind, or memories of videos shared on social media of broken little bodies; of families fleeing war-torn chaos clinging to limp bundles.

Of course, this is suffering. This is extreme suffering that children are living day in and day out, beyond many of our worst nightmares. Society generally agrees that it is not loving, nor justifiable, that children be subjected to such conditions (although the evidence around us would suggest that knowledge of these conditions in most cases does not incite within us a sincere desire to change and challenge our own beliefs and actions that contribute to this current terrible state of affairs).

Then, bringing the issue closer to home for us, there is the use of emotional abuse, and often physical violence (yes, I mean smacking!), used within the family home to control and manipulate a child into conforming to what is acceptable behaviour within that family. I have heard that this basically causes the systematic destruction of the real nature of the child, in favour of forcing it to fit a mould that does not confront nor challenge parents and society at large. Often, the damage that is done to children in this way is viewed as part of the construct of a ‘normal childhood’; society doesn’t see there is a problem. But while parents and other adults remain unwilling to confront and heal our own wounds from childhood, and awaken to the damage that we continue to perpetuate because of this, it would seem that the children in our care will continue to be burdened with emotional pain which then becomes their own. You can find a whole heap of valuable information about God’s Truth on parenting, from the Divine Truth teachings here, here and here.

And so I arrive at the subject I want to talk on, and about which I would love to see more truth exposed. As I mentioned earlier, most of us feel moved by the intense suffering we see children experiencing at the hands of war and famine. Many of us may even come to feel the truth that we indeed suffered at the hands of our family of origin in the process of growing up. But I believe that the numbers dwindle greatly in those of us who feel that the approximate 45 million children who are aborted, and the up to 100 million children who are miscarried – almost 150 million children every year – have suffered; despite this number accounting for the greatest portion of children who die annually because of decisions made that were not within their control.

Now, I can’t speak personally about abortion as it is not an experience I have had, but I have experienced a miscarriage. And to be honest, I have not fully healed the emotional reasons for this occurring, nor have I experienced the full process of repentance over the harm I have caused. However, whilst I am conscious there is more I need to learn on the subject personally, I feel that what I have come to realise, what I have been taught, and what I have experienced, could be useful to share.

In April 2013, I was not in a very good place emotionally. I was in a failing relationship; I was constantly enraged that I wasn’t getting “loved” (my version of what love should be, which is basically “just make me feel good about myself”; not real love), I was feeling justified in my angry demanding stance, and living in a desperate need to control everything in my environment to avoid the looming sense of terror at what a potential relationship breakdown was going to feel like. I was 27 years old, staring down the barrel of what had somehow become the great, dreaded, and terrifying ‘alone’. Inside of my soul I could feel (and still do) some very strong false beliefs about what it means to be a ‘good woman’, a ‘successful woman’, or a woman with any value, that have come down through my family’s inter-generational emotional condition.

A good woman has a family and has created a home. A successful woman has it together, is worldly, interesting, and “cool”.

A valuable woman is a mother.

Anything less than this state felt like utter failure to me, and my internal feel-like-a-failure-button was being poked painfully, again and again.

So it was within this emotional environment that, through a process I do not understand, we desired a new soul into our lives. I knew I was pregnant early on; I could feel it. I didn’t tell my partner straight away, but already I could feel something going on inside of me emotionally – something scary and exciting. So when I got the positive test, I had already decided that this was going to be exactly what I needed in my life. I could feel my partner didn’t share my enthusiasm, but that didn’t matter to me – I wanted this baby. This baby had the potential to change everything for us, we could start fresh, find a new place to live, build a life together. I would finally feel like I had a role to play, like I had somewhere to fit in within our family structures, like I had something to give and a place to fill in the world. I wouldn’t be a no-one anymore, I’d be someone. I’d be a mother.

In the two weeks or so that I knew for certain there was a little person growing inside of me, I had intellectually re-created myself. I had effectively pulled a pretty rug over the smelly pile of pain inside my heart, given myself another reason not to go there. I had also strangely developed an unhealthy obsession with the possibility of miscarriage – something I barely even knew about prior to my pregnancy – and was determined that that would not happen to me. I was not going to lose this baby.

This baby had a job to do, a role to play; I could not afford to lose it.

And therein lay the problem.

Miscarriage is not arbitrary. It is not something unavoidable that happens to unlucky parents-to-be. As much as I believe society wishes it to be, miscarriage is not a medical anomaly, or something to be evaded through diet and lifestyle changes. Miscarriage, as I have experienced it, occurs as a direct result of the emotional environment in which a new, highly sensitive and receptive soul, finds itself after conception.

In our case, I believe our child passed as a direct result of the demands I placed on it to fix me, to fix my life, to give me a sense of worth, and from the fear-based environment both my partner and I had created and proceeded to project onto the child. The decision I made which caused my child – God’s child – to pass into the spirit world at the tender age of 4 or 5 weeks old, was to not feel my emotional pain and release it, and instead continue to demand, overtly and covertly, that others make it go away for me. The exact emotional cause I imagine varies between people who experience miscarriages, and is dependent on the different unresolved emotions we each carry inside us. It was not my awareness of the pregnancy alone which led me to project my pain and demands on the child – the feelings were already inside of me, already projecting out onto the world. I think this is how women can miscarry without even knowing they’re pregnant; it’s the feelings we already carry inside our hearts which cause harm.

I don’t know if I can accurately describe in words how it felt to realise I was having a miscarriage, and then tread water through the following minutes, hours, days and weeks. There was a jumble of shock, fear, and deep sadness, but also a lot of intense pain around having my fantasy dream life ripped away from me. Having a child had quickly become an addiction to help me avoid my fear, and in the gulf that followed her passing, I had no other addictions, no substitutions that I could turn to that were powerful enough to adequately numb my fear which had been there all along . I had moments of touching what I can only describe as a black hole of terror, which in hindsight is probably where I needed to let myself go in order to allow true healing and release of my emotional pain which caused the miscarriage, and much of my unhappiness.

Interestingly, I discovered that the fears that came up so intensely for me during and after the miscarriage were the same fears I was trying so hard to suppress prior to and during my pregnancy – I was afraid to feel how much of a complete and utter failure I felt as a woman. The miscarriage brought these emotions into high-definition focus.

I still have heaps of grief to feel around this issue, and I haven’t yet even fully grieved the loss of this child because it feels to me to be so closely linked to my feelings of low self-worth, and I’m pretty resistive to going there! I still spend most of my time acting in ways which help to keep me away from those feelings, even though I have been taught that real, long-lasting healing comes through experiencing all of our emotions in a sincere way. As Mary Luck expresses:

‘Our emotions truly begin to change and shift in the moment we fully surrender to them. I don’t need to make sense of them. If I trust the process and long to God for Truth and Love as I go through them, my emotions guide me to a place of more understanding and freedom.’

Something else I really want to add is that from what I have heard, and through some of my own discoveries, there exists a spirit world, where all who pass from the earth live, including children who, from the moment of conception, are souls with individual and unique personalities and natures. I have heard that all miscarried and aborted children are assigned to special nurses and carers in the spirit world who nurture them through the difficult feelings they have as a result of their early passing (you can hear more about this in these interviews with AJ Miller about abortion and miscarriage; part 1 and part 2). I think it’s really beyond words that God is so good as to allow for this, and yet this does not mean that those of us who make direct choices – or force another to make choices – that lead to another person’s death do not shoulder the responsibility – we do. But I think what I am realising at least with my head if not yet with my heart, through the help of the Divine Truth teachings, is that God wants to lovingly help us through the process of becoming fully responsible human beings – responsible for our emotions and the choices and decisions we make as a result, not through punishment and judgement, but through love, compassion and kindness*.

Some time ago when I opened up a little to the pain around my miscarriage again, I felt a strong desire to know how my child is. I lay on my bed with my eyes shut, and had the experience of being led by a loving and kind person, perhaps one such spirit nurse or a guide, down a pathway of sorts. I felt nervous and afraid.

We arrived at an archway, through which was pouring such intense light I felt blinded, and I felt I could not enter. The feeling I had was that my child, by then almost 3, was through that archway, and they were happy – it was only I myself who stopped me from entering. This was overwhelming for me, there was just such love and kindness – more than I felt I could handle. How I interpreted this experience is that it showed me what a loving gift God has given us to be able to have a relationship with our children, dependent on our will to love, even while we live in different locations within the universe**. I have no doubt, though, that my child suffered pain as a result of her early death, the pain of not feeling loved, and of not experiencing life on earth the way God intended, and for this I must come to desire to take all due responsibility.

Of course, the best possible outcome would be that we no longer chose to abort our children because we are afraid, and that we all heal our emotional injuries that would lead to the miscarriage of a child. I have a feeling that would be the most loving thing we could choose to do for our unborn children.

Imagine if there were more loving systems in place to assist parents who are considering abortion, or who are at risk of miscarriage, to create a better outcome for their child – places where we could work together, as one human family, to care for God’s children however that may look.

I really do feel that if people knew the truth about children as truly unique souls, and the effect our emotions have on them from the moment of conception, it may change how we make decisions, and how we choose to view events. This comes with no judgment, I don’t believe, as I am someone who has been involved in a child’s early passing, and have felt some of the pain associated with such an event.

I still have much work to do, but hearing truth about these issues has helped me.

*I still dump a lot of my unresolved feelings about my parents onto God, and so am yet to fully feel what it is like to embrace and trust in these qualities of God.

**I do not yet have a relationship with my child as far as I am aware. I still have unresolved feelings and beliefs about myself and the spirit world which I think might prevent this. But I think wow, what a seriously cool opportunity! (For some more info on the sleep state from the Divine Truth teachings click here).

Jesus and Mary have provided an abundance of information about abortion, miscarriage, the spirit world, and emotional processing which you can find on their website:

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I watched the movie “Lion” for the second time tonight. The first time I saw it at the cinema, I cried for near on the whole movie. I was still hunched over, bawling, as the lights turned up, and a fellow cinema-goer felt compelled to make sure I was okay.

It wasn’t so much the theme of lost family and the pain associated with attempting re-connection, although that touched something deep within as there is a history of adoption in my family. But what affected my heart was the plight of so many children who are lost, unloved, alone, abandoned, hungry and vulnerable to harm. I have seen these children, walked among them, and fended off their pleading hands. The thing that hit, and hurt, my heart the most is coming to recognize the missed opportunities I have had to love.

In 2009 I lived in Calucutta (Kolkata), India, for the best part of a year. The scenes from the film were familiar to me. The city became a home of sorts, in a crazy, dirty, love-hate kind of way. You see, I was a nurse, newly qualified, and I wanted to live my life travelling to developing countries, working among the poorest and most in need. I wanted to serve, or so I thought.

Every day I traversed long distances along crowded streets, on subway trains and buses, stepped over rancid rubbish and human waste, dodged filthy water let loose from open windows above, and navigated curious and often uncomfortable attention from onlookers, as I made my way to work.

I implemented vaccination programs, I assisted in the treatment of tuberculosis and AIDS patients, and tended to patients with open, festering and gangrenous wounds. I was never, ever alone. The city was constantly and relentlessly alive, and thrummed with the population of roughly our entire country here in Australia. Humanity was everywhere, every one of my senses was saturated in some way with the life of another. And yet something was missing.

Something was wrong inside me; I could feel it and yet I did not know what it was.

I was doing what I wanted to do, I had “arrived”, so to speak, so why did I feel so unsatisfied, tired, even resentful towards the people I was serving? Why was I feeling more and more angry?

I realised, years later, that I wasn’t really serving. Because what I have been taught about true service is that it is a gift; it wants for nothing in return, only to love others.

“It is difficult to purify one’s desire to serve if the servant at first resists seeing the darkness within their own heart”

– Spirit friends, channeling received by Mary Luck

I see now that I was undertaking “good works” in order to gain feelings of validation and worth from what I was doing. I wanted to feel good by being useful, valuable, feel knowledgeable, interesting, worldly, and like someone people would approve of. All in an attempt to avoid the pain that really, inside, I didn’t feel any of those things.

“If your intention to help others is because you need something from them, it is not a state of love”

– AJ Miller

Street clinic in operation

Smiles. Always smiles.

At home under the bridge

What I am coming to learn about myself now, is that while I am only seeking to get these feelings from others, my heart is closed to the reception of truth and love, and closed to connection. I walked among people who suffer moment by moment and my heart was closed. I looked into the eyes of people who know pain, and who live and breath hardship I cannot imagine, and I could not sincerely offer love nor true friendship in a way that was consistent and wanted nothing in return. I thought that doing such work would bring satisfaction and joy to my life, but any satisfaction was fleeting and coloured by undercurrents of these other feelings. I have heard that the motivation must be love for any action to have a positive and long-lasting outcome, and my ability to love – truly love, and not attempt to engage in co-dependence and emotional barter – is what was and is lacking. A closed heart feels like a solid hard structure that exists at the interface of human connection … how is relationship possible from this place?

I would like to believe that there was some sincere and true motivation in my desire to help others in need. I’m not sure. I know that I continue to be drawn to roles of service, and the work ahead of me is in developing and purifying my desire to love. I also know that I haven’t healed my heart and released the pain which causes me to seek external validation. But something cool and encouraging I read about being of service is this:

– How can you serve your brother if you yell at your child?– How can you teach the sexually promiscuous to heal if you still judgesexual promiscuity yourself?– How can you encourage another to grieve the discretion against a partnerif you yourself are still full of rage towards partners current or previous?

Instead of trying to heal all of this before you begin, be ready instead, with a humbleheart, to cry with each of them and heal as you serve. What a gift it is to share yourhumility with another.

– Spirit friends, channeling received by Mary Luck

This would indicate that I don’t have to have fully healed everything inside of me in order to sincerely serve others. I just have to cultivate and grow my desire for personal humility; that is, the willingness to feel all of my feelings, all of the time, and not live in avoidance of them. I have heard that it is the avoidance of feeling our feelings that causes all the problems!

I feel much sorrow about the way I misused the opportunities God gave me through such an experience to learn about love, however I see that it was an opportunity in itself to see what doesn’t work, and learn from that. I now recognise that, while I’m shining a light on my experience in India as it presented me with such a stark view of human suffering and my personal choice to remain closed emotionally in the face of this, I am also learning that I have the choice – moment by moment – to use my will to love the people around me now, no matter where I am.

“To seek for purity in love, to seek to make every action one of love and honour for the magnificent creation before you, whomever that may be – including the one that peers back at you from the mirror!

This is what it is to truly serve.”

– Spirit friends, channelling received by Mary Luck

This seems to mean that service is not just about helping those who we deem to be in need or who are suffering. Perhaps it is an entire way of life; a decision made every moment to live as an example of one who seeks truth about all issues so as to better be able to express love and humility in the world. What a cool state that sounds like!

So when a movie such as “Lion” comes along, cracking my heart open with images of suffering so familiar to me, it presents me with yet another opportunity. It’s a reminder. It’s the voice that prompts me to keep going; seek the truth about why I currently resist love, grow my desire for personal change. For if I have love inside me then I have love to give. I can truly be of service.